150 Years since the Paris Commune: For Insurrectionary Memory, Against Imperial Amnesia
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| The Paris Commune, Unknown Artist, Getty Images |
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| French Police suppress pro-Palestine demonstrators, EuroNews |
This year, we commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune in a world dominated by the forces of imperialism, colonialism, counterrevolution, and reaction. The Mairie of Paris officially celebrated this memory while the French authorities banned and brutally suppressed demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian people. One uprising, with its legacy of egalitarian politics but also its violence, sabotage, and terror is consecrated as an inspiring model for revolution and direct democracy, and is instrumentalized to further consolidate France’s self-professed position as the custodian of the history of world revolution. The other is rendered unspeakable not only through police brutality but also through the arsenal of legal and paralegal practices connected to America’s war on terror and to the weaponization of the libel of anti-Semitism (itself rooted in a Western history of anti-Semitism to which the Arabs were victims side by side to their Jewish kin). Anne Hidalgo, Paris’ socialist mayor who decided to celebrate the memory of the Commune, herself supported this decision to ban the pro-Palestine protests. She thus demonstrated how, for a Western leftist, celebrating the legacy of revolution and suppressing contemporary anti-imperial revolution are not inconsistent.
What does it mean, then, to commemorate the Commune whilst Paris is partaking, on a global scale, of the role Versailles played during the events of 1871? It may be necessary, in this context to concede that the French Republic is not necessarily a monolith, and that the effort of Paris’s Socialist Mayor, Anne Hidalgo, can be seen as a “war of positions” to bring the revolutionary tradition to advanced positions within the French polity. The traditional complicity of the French Socialist Party—and Anne Hidalgo herself— with colonialism, imperialism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, nevertheless, means that the French Socialists (not counting a few voices from the Communist Party and the far left) are complicit in France’s role as part of the global Versailles, even as they celebrate the memory of the Commune.
And, what does the anniversary of the Commune mean on the decennial of the Arab uprisings of 2011? What does it mean to commemorate the Commune at a time when France is acting as the ally and arms’ dealer for counterrevolutionary governments in the Middle East, who are in turn shopping for legitimacy and foreign support for their military dictatorships? The memory of the Commune can conceal recent and ongoing insurrection unless we deal with the current French republic not as the custodian of the legacy of revolution but rather as the continuation of the counterrevolutionary regime that resided in Versailles, crushed the Commune, and installed the so-called Third Republic over the ruins and debris of the Commune— the same Third Republic that continued to carry out the imperialist tasks of the Second Empire. Only then can the memory of the Commune be in tune with the memory and reality of recent and contemporary uprisings.
Thus, instead of dealing with this cacophony of memory through a zero
sum game wherein one uprising negates the other (the game imperialism is
playing with the legacy of revolution, and the game some communards in fact
played, much to their detriment), I choose to write about this cacophony from a
position of constructive interference where
voices from various positions in space and time resonate with and enhance one
another.
This goes in line with a recent trend in critical history which aims to
decolonize the memory of the Commune. It particularly heeds the call by
anticolonial thinkers, especially ones centred around Latin American studies (George Ciccariello-Maher, Bruno Botseel) to
place the Commune within a larger militant tradition that extends beyond
France, and beyond the European metropole altogether.
To do so, the question of empire needs to be restored to the memory of the Commune.
The Empire against the Commune
The Commune was indeed bookended by imperial encounters and the events were dominated by questions of empire; the withering French Empire under which the conditions for revolution ripened; the belligerent Prussian Empire that invaded parts of France and laid siege to Paris; the collaborationist nature of the nascent Third Republic; and the attempts of the invaders and their local allies to confiscate the cannons of the national guard, in other words the arms of the people. The question of empire continued to haunt the Commune after its downfall; the endurance of the imperial infrastructure under the French Third Republic manifested in the exile of various communards—along with Algerian rebels—to the French colonies in the Pacific.
Unfinished Anti-Imperialism
The communards, on a certain level, understood their struggle as internationalist, and thus antithetical to empire (though not necessarily anti-imperialist). This was manifest through their symbolic gesture of demolishing the Vendôme column: the phallic object that stands at the centre of Paris as an emblem for the Empire (and which was restored after the defeat of the Commune and continues to stand to this very day). While the Commune was born amidst nationalistic fervor that refused to cede arms or territory to the Germans, it ended with one of the world’s most famous paeans to internationalism; L’internationale.
Beyond symbolic gestures, the Commune practiced internationalism through the implementation of a unique model for participatory international citizenship whereby foreigners were allowed to become active members of the society and the political institutions of the Commune.
The communards also understood Versailles for the imperialist power it is, and were able to connect its brutality with which they were faced, to the brutality the French empire exercises in the colonies. Indeed, they believed that the Versailles forces acquired their brutality a few years earlier when they were massacring Algerians and burning down their villages; “all the Versailles generals are of this school” according to one of the members of the Commune who were vocal concerning the colonial question.
The Internationale, Unites
the Human Race?
This, unfortunately, never translated into a solid
anti-imperialist or anti-colonial programme. On the contrary, scholars who studied the
Commune through a decolonial lens noted the communard’s failure to extend any
networks of support and solidarity with the Mokrani uprising, which unfolded in
Algeria at the same time.
The simultaneous emergence of the
two uprisings (partly as a result of the decline of the Second Empire), their
suppression through the same arsenal of state violence (including the symbolic
violence that imagined the rebels as savages, a point I will return to
shortly), and their common exile to the French colony of New Caledonia all
highlight the imperial settings under which rebellion fomented and was
suppressed in both the colony and the metropole. These common roots and destinies
were nevertheless initially lost on the communards, cursory articulations of
anticolonial sympathy notwithstanding. This was especially the case with the Commune
d’Alger, an uprising by French settlers in Algeria against their
metropolitan government and in solidarity with Paris, which failed to
recognize, let alone coordinate with, the autochthonous uprising. On the contrary, historian Niklas Plaetzer, in his highly informative
essay “Decolonizing the ‘Universal Republic’: The Paris Commune and the French
Empire” identifies the Commune d’Alger as an instant that exposes the
limitations of the universalism of French revolutionary discourse: while
espousing a discourse of revolutionary
internationalism and solidarity, the members of the Algiers Commune were in
fact opposed to the claims of the indigenous Arabs, which, in the words of
Plaetzer, resulted in “defending Algiers as the last citadel of civilization
and defining the boundaries of the white settler republic not only against the
metropole but, silently, in opposition to the colonized.” Marxist historian
Vladimir Lutsky goes
further to posit that the fear of an Arab uprising pushed the otherwise
progressive elements of the settler society in Algeria to the position of
political reaction and into support of the Versailles government. The failure
to confront the imperial question was thus detrimental to the larger
revolutionary potentials of the Commune, and further contributed to dooming the
Commune to remain a geographically and temporally limited, if inspiring,
moment. Metropolitan Western leftists, not to mention settler leftists in
Palestine and elsewhere, continue, with few exceptions, to make this mistake to
this very day as they provincialize or altogether silence (sometimes even
oppose) anti-colonial voices, effectively undermining the emergence of world
revolution. Let this be a lesson for all
the Bernie supporters and other US leftists who wish to completely absent the
question of empire from their agenda but accept the rest of the world to follow
their agenda—and who by doing so cover-up their own privilege as the beneficiaries
of empire. Let this also be a reminder to the British Labour, which is
actively purging its own anti-imperialist elements (including a bigoted,
absurd, and virulently anti-Semitic purge
against its anti-Zionist
Jewish members). Such an imperialist left will end up being nothing more
than an alibi for the right. And, of course, let this be a lesson for Anne
Hidalgo who celebrates the Commune but intentionally misses its lessons; who
wants to commemorate the insurrection, but is complicit with the politics of
the global Versailles.
The Spectre of Empire
Even as
the communards failed to confront the imperial/colonial question, the imperial
question relentlessly haunted them.
Their exile to the French colonies of New Caledonia presented the
culmination of a set of strategies that imagined the rebels in Europe as akin
to savages that do not belong in the civilized world. While
counterrevolutionary reports on the Commune (along with a few sympathetic
reports) commonly likened the communards (especially the women) to
Native Americans, Turks, Arabs, and other savages, the Standard newspaper
likened the activities of the “Parisian traitors” to the acts of “heathen
nations” declaring the communards, their sympathizers, and anyone who would
grant them amnesty or refuge, as “barbarians” and “enemies of civilization.”
When
various Parisian governmental-monumental buildings caught fire (at a time when
Versailles was bombing the city), the fire was attributed to insane and
hysterical revolutionary arsonists. Their fire was
coded along a civilizational-evolutionary grid that placed them alongside
‘primitive populations’ and ‘racial savages’, opposed to the advanced,
civilized, and evolved fire of order (Versailles in this example, though we can
see resonances
with the modern
opposition between, on the one side the primitive and explosive fire of
resistance groups, insurrectionaries, dissident
crowds, and “terrorists,” and, on the other side, the technologically
advanced and allegedly precise fire of the armies and militarized security
forces of the US, “Israel,” and other Western and imperialist forces).
Discursive
and institutional imperial politics placed the communards, even against their
will, next to the colonized: in the rhetoric of counterrevolutionary observers,
and later in colonial exile. Finding themselves in discursive and (in the case
of the ones who were exiled) physical proximity to the colonized, former
communards started, from this point onwards, to express solidarity with
anti-colonial struggles. Louise Michel, who became a sort of a feminist icon of
the Commune, famously expressed her support for the native Kanaks of New Caledonia, established close personal
connection with the former Algerian rebels she met in exile, and continued to vocally support the Algerian cause after her return from exile. Ten
years later, the ‘Urabi revolt erupted in Egypt and soon took a fierce
anti-colonial turn. Various former communards (most notably Prosper-Olivier
Lissagaray, the veteran and historian of the Commune, who was, as a matter of
fact, exiled to London, and more specifically to Karl Marx’s house, rather than
to New Caledonia) expressed their unequivocal support to the Egyptian rebels,
and proclaimed them soldiers of liberty. This led to (largely unfounded) claims
by Arab and French counterrevolutionary newspapers that former communards were
volunteering in the ranks of ‘Urabi, especially as the rebels were engaged in
revolutionary warfare against the invading British army and its local
collaborators.
From Paris to Palestine
The
memory of the Commune, therefore, belongs less and less in the official
corridors of Mairie of Paris or the French Republic, and more and more in the
streets that faced the brutality of the French police, in the crowds marching
against the Empire and its proxies, and in anti-colonial revolts. It belongs in
the hearts and minds that remember the 2011 uprisings, and bear the trauma of
their suppression and/or their transformation into civil wars under the
tutelage of Western powers, France included.
And while I am wary of forced analogies that
risk to reify the commune as the ultimate model other insurrections need to
uphold (which would in itself constitute a colonial predicament), it is safe to
say that, despite all differences (and whether Anne Hidalgo and the entire
French left like it or not), the spirit of the Commune is most at home in
contemporary Palestine: where the most inspirational
uprising of the time crystallizes in one city (Gaza) yet reverberates throughout
the national body and historical territories of Palestine, and where a besieged
insurrection is tasked with fighting colonialism (not only Israeli settler
colonialism but American imperialism which provides the logistical and moral
backbone for the settler colony of Israel), facing a collaborationist
government (the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank which, much
like the Versailles forces, attempted to confiscate the people’s arms, to no
avail, and which, along with the Tel Aviv government, vows to stem out
opposition and resistance with the same panache and
brutality that characterized the Versailles reaction), and where a besieged yet
resolute people are translating their own aspirations for national liberation into
an internationalist programme that carries the promise and burden to create the
entire world anew.
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| Barricades, the Paris Commune, May 1871, Painting by André Devambez |
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